It has been a while since Justin Webb last listened to an album in its entirety. In fact, admits the BBC's North America editor, he hasn't done so for nigh-on 30 years. "What was the last record I bought?" he says, his crystal-clear delivery a reminder of the days when BBC presenters were obliged to speak the Queen's English. "I really have no idea." Idly, Record Doctor chucks in a few names, every single one of which prompts the same response: a nonplussed chuckle and a shake of the head. "Truly," says the Bath-raised Webb, 48, who has lived in Washington since 2001, "anything post-Neil Young I'm ignorant about. If I told my wife I was going into a darkened room in order to listen to the latest... erm, tracks she'd have some choice words, I suspect."

Thanks to his coverage of the US election, Webb became a household name in the UK last year and, on 20 January, he will be reporting on Barack Obama's inauguration with his usual authority and charm. In conversation, too, he is very likable: self-deprecating, laid-back and quietly impudent, a prefect in possession of The Anarchist Cookbook. "Do I think Obama's regard for hip-hop is genuine? Well," he laughs, carefully weighing up his words, "I think they probably stressed the hip-hop more than Bach's Cello Suite, which I've heard he also likes. Your challenge - and I'm not making that challenge - but if you care to make that challenge then you've probably got a point. Part of his stance may be... political."

Either way, what isn't in dispute is that America's president-elect knows considerably more about hip-hop than Webb does. "I don't even know what it is. If I got some on my shoe I would wipe it off, I guess, but I have absolutely no idea." Similarly, he has never heard of Joy Division, despite his weakness for melancholy music, the best of which, he says, is too sublime to be sad. "No, brilliant music can't be depressing. Sad music brilliantly played, or which is intrinsically brilliant and reminds you of something in your life that is sad, is there to be cherished, not avoided."

Misery was never part of Slade's repertoire but they were the first band to register with Webb. "I loved everything about them," he says, referring specifically to Noddy Holder's voice and the elemental nature of their songs, which, combined with their Wolverhampton accents, ensured that "people had it in for them". "But I didn't know, or care, where they came from. Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me is not a challenging lyric, but it's belted out with the sort of vigour that so appeals at that age."

At the age in question, 11 or 12, Webb was enlivened by glam rock as a whole. "I was a pretty conventional little boy and, to me, it seemed like a world that was fabulous." Most fabulous of all were Marc Bolan and David Bowie, whose weakness for make-up underscored their otherness. "Did I experiment with eyeliner? No. I experimented with all sorts of things at school but eyeliner wasn't one of them."

At university in the early Eighties, he swapped glam rock for "more ambitious" sounds, discovering, first, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, then Neil Young/CSNY, Fairport Convention and the "long forgotten" US hard rock band Mountain. "Which made me pretty out of sync with what was going on. Maybe that was why I had no friends."

In truth, it would seem, he had plenty of friends, judging by his liberal use of the collective pronoun when recounting his memories of university. "We believed in the things that the American hippies of the late Sixties did, misguided as we and they doubtless were. We fancied ourselves as being part of some youngsters' cultural revolution. We weren't going to get our hair cut and work in offices." He pauses and smirks. "Which is what I do now of course."

In October, Webb will start work in a new office when, controversially, he'll replace Ed Stourton as a presenter on the Today programme, the latter learning of his fate from a third party. He knows little about his new colleagues' musical tastes, he says, but hopes that they'll share his contempt for "stupid lyrics". "And I don't mean in the Slade sense. Sentences that are simple are fine and sentences that are complex are fine. But I don't like sentences that just don't make any sense or are pretentious. I remember being quite annoyed by some rock lyric - it was by Yes or someone - and thinking, 'This is a load of old toss.'"

But what, asks Record Doctor, of the numerous great songs whose melodies eclipse the shortcomings of the words? Think, for instance, of Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger.

"Oasis," he says, distractedly, muttering to himself. "Oasis... Oasis... Yes, I know the name ..."